CH340E, A New Small Serial to USB Chip
https://www.electronics-lab.com/ch340e-new-small-serial-usb-chip/
WCH, a Chinese integrated circuits manufacturer, has just released a new serial to USB chip called CH340E. Unlike other CH340 chips, it doesn’t require an external crystal and also needs less PCB space and BOM. CH340 is a 3x3mm tiny chip comes in MSOP10 package and has 10 pins. Although it is smaller than other alternatives, it is […]
Making A Pickit 3 Clone
https://www.electronics-lab.com/making-pickit-3-clone/
Make Your Own Pic Programmer and Debugger. by reviahh @ reviahh.wordpress.com After using the Microchip tools to program and debug the projects I work on, I wondered about creating my own programming/debugging module that I could put on my own boards – just like Microchip does with their starter kits and such. As I became […]
Open-V, The Open Source RISC-V 32bit Microcontroller
https://www.electronics-lab.com/open-v-open-source-risc-v-32bit-mcu/
Open source has finally arrived to microcontrollers. Based on RISC-V instruction set, a group of doctoral students at the Universidad Industrial de Santander in Colombia have been working on an open source 32-bit chip called “Open-V“. Onchip, the startup of the research team, is focusing on integrated systems and is aiming to build the first system-on-chip designed in Colombia. The […]
Self-learning neuromorphic chip composes music
https://www.electronics-lab.com/self-learning-neuromorphic-chip-composes-music/
Peter Clarke @ eedesignnewseurope.com reporting: Research institute IMEC has created a neuromorphic chip based on metal-oxide ReRAM technology that has the ability to self-learn. That self-learning has been applied to music making. Self-learning neuromorphic chip composes music – [Link]
Reverse engineering the 76477 sound effect chip
https://www.electronics-lab.com/reverse-engineering-76477-sound-effect-chip/
Ken Shirriff has written an article on reverse engineering the 76477 “Space Invaders” sound effect chip: Remember the old video game Space Invaders? Some of its sound effects were provided by a chip called the 76477 Complex Sound Generation chip. While the sound effects1 produced by this 1978 chip seem primitive today, it was used […]
Inside the vintage 74181 ALU chip
https://www.electronics-lab.com/inside-vintage-74181-alu-chip/
Ken Shirriff writes: The 74181 ALU (arithmetic/logic unit) chip powered many of the minicomputers of the 1970s: it provided fast 4-bit arithmetic and logic functions, and could be combined to handle larger words, making it a key part of many CPUs. Inside the vintage 74181 ALU chip – [Link]
Bluetooth chip is only 4x4mm
https://www.electronics-lab.com/bluetooth-chip-4x4mm/
by Julien Happich @ edn-europe.com: Part of the Swatch group, EM Microelectronic announced what the company believes to be the world’s smallest Bluetooth chip. Offered in a 4x4mm QFN-28 package, in a WLCSP-21 or as a bare-die, the EM9304 is optimized for Bluetooth v4.2 low energy enabled products. Bluetooth chip is only 4x4mm – [Link]
ICStripBoard – PCB rapid prototyping tool
https://www.electronics-lab.com/icstripboard-pcb-rapid-prototyping-tool/
ICStripBoard is a innovative cheap tool to enable rapid prototyping of surface mount integrated circuits (IC’s) and allow their usage in prototype electronics projects. Inline surface mount IC’s come in a Variety of packages which are different sizes and these Printed Circuit Boards (PCB’s) have been designed to accommodate the majority of IC’s. Available […]
Software Defined Radio IC Decap
https://www.electronics-lab.com/software-defined-radio-ic-decap/
Software Defined Radio teardown: R820/RTL2832U Decap Recently there has been much interest in two integrated circuit which were originally designed to receive FM radio and DVB-T TV (as used in Europe). Some enterprising people quickly realised that since they were based on software-defined techniques they could be quickly re purposed for all sorts of clever […]
Keeping up with Moore’s Law
https://www.electronics-lab.com/keeping-moores-law/
by Clemens Valens @ elektormagazine.com: There was a time that every extra storage byte crammed into a chip was greeted with cheers and applause but today only few people will get the champagne out when an extra gigabyte or so is announced. We have become so used to the ever growing capacity of memory chips […]